At least 105 people have been killed in riots in Nigeria stoked by Muslim fury over the country's staging of the Miss World pageant next month, Red Cross officials said yesterday.
Hundreds have also been injured in the riots in the northern city of Kaduna, where enraged youths have torched churches and mosques, the president of the Nigerian Red Cross, Emmanuel Ijewere, told reporters.
"The 105 are identifiable deaths," Ijewere said by phone from the capital Abuja.
He suggested the toll could rise further, saying: "There are some houses that have not been entered. It is possible that there are injured in these houses."
Residents of Kaduna said sporadic shooting could be heard yesterday morning as soldiers and police battled rioters despite a 24-hour curfew in the volatile city, where thousands died in sectarian riots two years ago.
Authorities initially clamped an overnight curfew on the city about 600km northwest of Lagos on Thursday. Soldiers were drafted in to help police contain the rioting, sparked by a newspaper article linking the pageant and the Prophet Mohammad.
Trouble first flared up on Wednesday over a report in This Day, an independent newspaper, which claimed the Prophet Mohammad would have married one of the Miss World beauty queens.
Rioters looted shops and overturned cars, and the unrest quickly turned into a general protest against the Miss World contest, to be held on Dec. 7 in Abuja.
The Kaduna violence has triggered tension in other parts of predominantly Islamic northern Nigeria.
Security forces were expected to be on heightened alert in northern Nigeria's biggest city of Kano -- a hotbed of sectarian unrest -- during Muslim prayers yesterday.
The government of President Olusegun Obasanjo has appealed for calm, and warned that anyone found fomenting disorder would be decisively dealt with.
The rioting was the latest crisis to befall Nigeria's plans to hold the Miss World contest, already hit by protests over the sentencing of Muslim women in northern Nigeria to death by stoning for adultery.
The fundamentalist Nigerian Muslim Umma, an umbrella group of Islamic clerics and scholars, has declared a "serious religious emergency" and issued a statement calling on the government to stop the pageant.
On Thursday, in its first reaction to the violence, the Obasanjo government said it was taking necessary steps to punish those associated with the newspaper report, "which without doubt exceeded the bounds of responsible journalism by making [a] provocative publication on the Holy Prophet".
The newspaper, which had its Kaduna office attacked and burned, ran its third apology for the report on Thursday's front page since it first published the story. It said the story went out in error.
The Miss World contest, which Nigerian officials hope will showcase the country and add to its tourist appeal, initially ran into trouble amid worldwide publicity over Amina Lawal, a 31-year-old woman who was sentenced under Islamic law to death by stoning for bearing a child out of wedlock.
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